2010 Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery"Thomas Roma doesn't do easy: He's a major talent who has devoted his career to what others would consider negligible subject matter-nondescript sections of his native Brooklyn that evidence the decades of the borough's decline. It is his remarkable achievement to have produced works that are attractive, even elegant, from such unlikely material. Since 1980 he has published 11 books; the current exhibition comprises almost 100 black-and-white pictures from four of them.The streetscapes from "Found in Brooklyn" have lots of cyclone fences, houses with aluminum or asphalt siding, and gardens filled with gasping flowers, scraggly vines and undistinguished concrete statues. Mr. Roma's sophisticated eye does not so much make order out of this mix of stuff as find a point from which the extent of the jumble can be properly ascertained. The textures of worn building materials are treated with enormous respect. The black parishioners in "Come Sunday" are mostly shot straight on; their religious fervor is presented as a simple fact, as when a woman in a white robe is shown singing into a microphone with her eyes shut, a glisten of tears running down her face. The pictures of the unprepossessing synagogues in "On Three Pillars" are not about architecture, but rather the quotidian aspect the pursuit of holiness assumes on Brooklyn's streets. Mr. Roma teaches at Columbia; his pictures are lessons in the possibilities of photography."
——William Meyers, from The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2010
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)